When it comes to promoting your B2B business, don’t overlook LinkedIn.
The professional social network just announced that there are more than 575M members worldwide. With more than 150M members in the US alone, LinkedIn provides an effective way to reach professionals working in your target industries. And although the numbers sound like a marketers dream, it definitely comes with some caveats.
One of the challenges all social networks have is user engagement, and LinkedIn is certainly not immune to this issue. Despite having more than half a billion members, the announcement doesn’t actually specify how many of those members are active. While companies like Twitter and Facebook routinely remove spam accounts, LinkedIn hasn’t publicly shared any account auditing figures.
Additionally, while 575M is a large number, it pales in comparison with Twitter and Facebook, which have 262M and 2.2B active monthly users respectively. But more isn’t always better, and for B2B companies LinkedIn’s targeting functionality can be extremely valuable in the right circumstance.
One of the things that Facebook and Twitter lack is in-depth knowledge of their users’ professional lives. With LinkedIn, you can not only target your ads to people in a specific industry, but you can also filter specific job titles and functionalities. By doing so, you can save money by not serving your ads to people working in unrelated industries or who won’t be influential in the purchasing decision. Even better - it can also help you filter out your competitors.
If you’ve been holding off on advertising on LinkedIn, it might be time to give it a try. Even if you’ve already tested it in previous years, their user growth makes it hard to ignore for B2B promotion.
